I spent my kindergarten through second grade years just outside of Dayton, Tennessee, in a town called Spring City. My father had graduated in 1984 from the East Tennessee School of Preaching and Missions in Karns, Tennessee, just outside Knoxville, and his very first preaching position was there at the Spring City church of Christ.
I don’t remember much about our family’s time in Rhea County because I was so young, but I do remember the brick and siding split-level house about five miles outside town. It had a gravel drive that seemed like a mile going to get the paper or the mail on hot summer days, and an air conditioner that was as cool as the other side of the pillow after I had outrun the sweat bees on my way back from getting that paper or the mail.
In 1986, I sat on our brown couch in that house and watched the Challenger shuttle explode before America’s eyes on television. And, it was in the kitchen of that house that I accidentally killed Sea Monkeys by picking up the little plastic container by the lid instead of the base spilling its contents all over the linoleum. I felt like a mass murderer.
I learned to ride a bike without training wheels; I learned that Daddy didn’t like us boys to go out behind the old chicken coop; I found out that you can’t catch rabbits with a homemade trap made out of a Hardee’s cup, a stick and a few stale Doritos; and even though I didn't know it at the time, I learned about my great-great-grandfather, Arthur Jenkins.
If you entered the house through the front door, walked about four steps and turned right, you would be at the foot of the stairs that led to the bathroom, Dad’s office, my parents’ bedroom, and my brother’s and my bedroom. We slept on parallel twin size beds with a bookshelf between us. During the day in that room we would play church by mimicking the Holy Communion sacraments on a coffee saucer, and at night we would read Berenstain Bears books by lamplight and giggle ourselves to sleep.
One night something I could not explain broke me from my sleep. Without moving, I lie awake and listened, but I couldn't hear anything more than my younger brother, Shane, snoring, fast asleep in his bed three feet away, and I didn’t see anything other than what the yellow light from the bathroom down the hall revealed through our open door.
What I did next gave me a memory that has remained with me as clearly as any film or picture I have ever seen in my life.
Since I didn’t see anything while facing my brother, I turned to my other side just to re-position myself and returned to sleep. It was this move that exposed the reason I had stirred.
A man. An older bald man wearing a red, white and blue suit, a white shirt with a string bowtie, and holding on to a smooth hickory cane. He was sitting, smiling and looking at me in the same safe and warm way my granddad did when I walked through the door of his house on Christmas day after a long van ride from east Tennessee to southern Indiana. And, while I certainly wasn’t expecting to see some man next to my bed, I must say that the whole scene never scared or even startled me. In fact, seeing him made me feel good and well-protected.
I noticed he was in a rocking chair rocking back and forth, and after a second of just looking at him, he reached out his long arm to place his large hand on my side, and I immediately returned to sleep.
The next night it happened again.
I was lying on my side, the same as the night before, and awoke in the same fashion. This time I just knew he was there beside me so I barely leaned my body backward and peeked out of the corner of my eye. Sure enough, he was there smiling and attempting to lean forward himself to let me know that he knew I saw him.
It wasn’t until much later, in junior high, when I found out who he was.
I was standing in my great-grandmother’s dining room rummaging around next to her old record player through quite a collection of old canes. There was a long white one that looked like the striped cylinder that hangs outside a barbershop; a bamboo one that surely accompanied a dancer in the 30s; and then there was one that looked just like that old smooth hickory cane that I saw the man holding when I was in Spring City.
I grabbed it and ran into the kitchen to tell my grandmother the story that cane reminded me of.
I told her all about the man: his cane, his clothes, his head, his smile. Her expression looked as if she couldn’t believe her ears and walked away. I didn’t know if I had made her angry or sad until she returned holding an old, gold-framed picture taken in 1978 of her grandfather, “Paw-paw,” Arthur Jenkins.
When I saw the picture, I was speechless. In her very hands was a picture of the man beside my bed. She told me that while he did get to hold me when I was a baby, I’d never really met him because he died not long after my birth. The suit I had described to her was the very one in which they buried him.
We sat at the kitchen table for the next couple of hours talking about Paw-paw. And while the living room could have held us, we all chose to remain packed around the kitchen table glued to the unfolding stories of the family members who filed in one-by-one telling of the time that they too saw Pawpaw.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Saturday, April 08, 2006
In Tune With the Storm's Garden (Ponderings About the Neutrality of the Future)
Right now someone is doing something for the very last time. It may even be me. Tying their shoes, cooking lunch, arguing, saying "I love you." It's the calm before the storm. The time when those who will die have no idea and every idea at the same time. They will say and do things that will be remembered on Monday when they are buried.
"How strange that he..."
"She told me..."
"I had no idea that would be the last time I ever heard his voice."
Something will be left undone. Something else will be wrapped up sufficently. Everything will end tonight for someone who did everything right and still died, and for someone who ignored and dies as a result. No one is safe. Nothing is sacred.
Say: I love you. I hate you. I will miss you. I need you. I'll be back.
Fate has you now and you will rest or roam with the answers to all your questions. Even answers you didn't know you would need to questions you never thought you would ask.
And, as much as you will want to tell me, and as badly as I'll want to know -- we can't communicate any longer.
Tonight will be the worst night of someone's life. Tonight will be the best night of someone's life. Tonight will be remembered forever. Tonight will never be thought of again. Tonight.
Forever tonight. Into the oblivion of time either on the line never visited again or on the circle to return one day.
Head to the east. Their sages can save you atop mountains of stone and knowledge where moderation and flow move through the body tuning every discordant note. The music will not fix you. It will not prepare you. It will not guide you. It will only accompany you.
The garden will not soothe you. It will order you. But only if it's in control. The sand, the rocks, the birds, the rake -- but instruments of splendor which by themselves represent only the ability. Combine with capability and acceptance, movement and light, sound and air.
Tonight marks not the beginning or the end, the middle or the prior, the thought nor the afterthought.
It will not be bad. It will not be good.
It will be.
So breathe.
(written while listening to "Mending Your Own Mind" and "Calming Insight of Ourselves" both from Dean Evenson's album Healing Sanctuary while contemplating the coming storms of April 7th, 2006 in the midwest and southeast)
"How strange that he..."
"She told me..."
"I had no idea that would be the last time I ever heard his voice."
Something will be left undone. Something else will be wrapped up sufficently. Everything will end tonight for someone who did everything right and still died, and for someone who ignored and dies as a result. No one is safe. Nothing is sacred.
Say: I love you. I hate you. I will miss you. I need you. I'll be back.
Fate has you now and you will rest or roam with the answers to all your questions. Even answers you didn't know you would need to questions you never thought you would ask.
And, as much as you will want to tell me, and as badly as I'll want to know -- we can't communicate any longer.
Tonight will be the worst night of someone's life. Tonight will be the best night of someone's life. Tonight will be remembered forever. Tonight will never be thought of again. Tonight.
Forever tonight. Into the oblivion of time either on the line never visited again or on the circle to return one day.
Head to the east. Their sages can save you atop mountains of stone and knowledge where moderation and flow move through the body tuning every discordant note. The music will not fix you. It will not prepare you. It will not guide you. It will only accompany you.
The garden will not soothe you. It will order you. But only if it's in control. The sand, the rocks, the birds, the rake -- but instruments of splendor which by themselves represent only the ability. Combine with capability and acceptance, movement and light, sound and air.
Tonight marks not the beginning or the end, the middle or the prior, the thought nor the afterthought.
It will not be bad. It will not be good.
It will be.
So breathe.
(written while listening to "Mending Your Own Mind" and "Calming Insight of Ourselves" both from Dean Evenson's album Healing Sanctuary while contemplating the coming storms of April 7th, 2006 in the midwest and southeast)
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
New Short Fiction Coming
My newest short fiction piece is in the works. Below is the beginning to "Dusty's Trail," which is supposed to act as a bit of a teaser for you, though it actually may have the opposite effect.
Dusty's Trail
"Up ahead is the trail Dusty told me about. I don’t think I ever would have seen it without his help. When you’re not looking for it, it blends in with the rest of the woods, but looking at it straight on it’s obvious. The new and old oaks rise and bend over it making the whole entrance look like a tall cathedral window so Dusty calls it Cathedral Trail. It’s religious for him, and it’s becoming that way for me.
I’ve been here to this field a hundred times. It never gets old because the seasons are always changing. Sometimes my feet drag the green grass and leave a light slug trail that’s visible when the sun is out. Other times the leaves crunch under my shoes and the sound of the rustle echoes for what feels like a thousand miles. I hate making noise out here. I feel like I’m disturbing all of nature, like laughing in church.
The air is a bit cleaner right here and it’s always windy. I have a theory about that. The trees trap this field on every side. The only breaks are the path I took to get here and the trail Dusty told me about. Sometimes it feels like protection and sometimes it feels like a lynching, but either way I think the breeze finds its way here because the trees open up like they do and allow the wind to fall to the ground pretty hard. I don’t really know that for truth, but I feel like it makes sense. But, I don’t guess nature makes a lot of sense. Like the trees – they’re here, I always see them, but for most of the year they’re dead, and I walk on the drippings of their death making all kinds of embarrassing noise.
There’s no time to be studying this place right now. I’ll be back soon enough. For now, I’ve got to find that stone-slab table he was talking about. Once I get to the trail it won’t be so loud and I think I can be to the table in about twenty minutes.
That table, according to him, either was or is a horrible place. Dusty said that a local Satan worshipping group used it to sacrifice their animals and do all their little rituals. Maybe I’m sadistic for wanting to go see it, but the thought of something like that being in these very woods is just haunting enough to be tempting.
I’ve never admitted this kind of thing to anyone, but I’m a little freakish like that. I love death and funerals and crime scenes. When I go to a place where I know someone has died, it feels holy, like a portal. All the seconds of someone’s life were counting down to this very place and maybe they, the seconds themselves, even knew it, watching sadly, or not, this human or animal do everything for the very last time. Maybe I am the only person in my life that doesn’t know when and where I’ll die, or how."
Dusty's Trail
"Up ahead is the trail Dusty told me about. I don’t think I ever would have seen it without his help. When you’re not looking for it, it blends in with the rest of the woods, but looking at it straight on it’s obvious. The new and old oaks rise and bend over it making the whole entrance look like a tall cathedral window so Dusty calls it Cathedral Trail. It’s religious for him, and it’s becoming that way for me.
I’ve been here to this field a hundred times. It never gets old because the seasons are always changing. Sometimes my feet drag the green grass and leave a light slug trail that’s visible when the sun is out. Other times the leaves crunch under my shoes and the sound of the rustle echoes for what feels like a thousand miles. I hate making noise out here. I feel like I’m disturbing all of nature, like laughing in church.
The air is a bit cleaner right here and it’s always windy. I have a theory about that. The trees trap this field on every side. The only breaks are the path I took to get here and the trail Dusty told me about. Sometimes it feels like protection and sometimes it feels like a lynching, but either way I think the breeze finds its way here because the trees open up like they do and allow the wind to fall to the ground pretty hard. I don’t really know that for truth, but I feel like it makes sense. But, I don’t guess nature makes a lot of sense. Like the trees – they’re here, I always see them, but for most of the year they’re dead, and I walk on the drippings of their death making all kinds of embarrassing noise.
There’s no time to be studying this place right now. I’ll be back soon enough. For now, I’ve got to find that stone-slab table he was talking about. Once I get to the trail it won’t be so loud and I think I can be to the table in about twenty minutes.
That table, according to him, either was or is a horrible place. Dusty said that a local Satan worshipping group used it to sacrifice their animals and do all their little rituals. Maybe I’m sadistic for wanting to go see it, but the thought of something like that being in these very woods is just haunting enough to be tempting.
I’ve never admitted this kind of thing to anyone, but I’m a little freakish like that. I love death and funerals and crime scenes. When I go to a place where I know someone has died, it feels holy, like a portal. All the seconds of someone’s life were counting down to this very place and maybe they, the seconds themselves, even knew it, watching sadly, or not, this human or animal do everything for the very last time. Maybe I am the only person in my life that doesn’t know when and where I’ll die, or how."
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Would You Like to Buy Any Oil?
"In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell."
-H. L. Mencken
-H. L. Mencken
Friday, January 13, 2006
Think About It
"CHRISTIAN, n.: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
"I dreamed I stood upon a hill, and, lo!
The godly multitudes walked to and fro
Beneath, in Sabbath garments fitly clad,
With pious mien, appropriately sad,
While all the church bells made a solemn din --
A fire-alarm to those who lived in sin.
Then saw I gazing thoughtfully below,
With tranquil face, upon that holy show
A tall, spare figure in a robe of white,
Whose eyes diffused a melancholy light.
'God keep you, strange,' I exclaimed. 'You are
No doubt (your habit shows it) from afar;
And yet I entertain the hope that you,
Like these good people, are a Christian too.'
He raised his eyes and with a look so stern
It made me with a thousand blushes burn
Replied -- his manner with disdain was spiced:
'What! I a Christian? No, indeed! I'm Christ.'"
-Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
"I dreamed I stood upon a hill, and, lo!
The godly multitudes walked to and fro
Beneath, in Sabbath garments fitly clad,
With pious mien, appropriately sad,
While all the church bells made a solemn din --
A fire-alarm to those who lived in sin.
Then saw I gazing thoughtfully below,
With tranquil face, upon that holy show
A tall, spare figure in a robe of white,
Whose eyes diffused a melancholy light.
'God keep you, strange,' I exclaimed. 'You are
No doubt (your habit shows it) from afar;
And yet I entertain the hope that you,
Like these good people, are a Christian too.'
He raised his eyes and with a look so stern
It made me with a thousand blushes burn
Replied -- his manner with disdain was spiced:
'What! I a Christian? No, indeed! I'm Christ.'"
-Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Books I Read in 2005:
Inherit the Wind
by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
Based on the infamous Scopes Trials in a 1925 Dayton, Tennessee courtroom, this play offers an only slightly varied version of the happenings that summer. Considering the current battle over the issue, and the apparently blinded Christian attitude toward it, this would be a fine read lasting you barely two days time.
My favorite thing:
Hornbeck’s wit. Compare it to that of the great writer/journalist/philosopher, H.L. Mencken, the man on whom the character is based.
Searching for God Knows What
by Donald Miller
Donald Miller should be considered the most prolific Christian writer of our present day. His grasp on logic and reality is reassuring in that those who would identify will no longer have to feel alone in the world. He approaches the Christian life truthfully in the relational manner in which it was intended to be lived instead of the rule-oriented, broken down, throwback to the Old Testament idea of formulas and bullet-points. A must read for everyone who has grown accustomed to breathing.
My favorite thing:
Most of the pages of text found between the front cover and the one in the back.
The Auto-Biography of an Ex-Coloured Man
by James Weldon Johnson
Follow the life of a nameless boy, a child born to a white man from a black mother, into manhood. His countenance is so fair that he could pass as a caucasian, but doesn’t quite understand the power of such a thought until he lives a most extraordinary life worthy of any world class man of affluence, yet still finds that he will be limited by something as merely biological as pigment.
My Favorite Thing:
Notice the underlying theme music plays in his growth and how it affects, with great consequence, the outcomes of his life.
Prisoners Without Trial
by Roger Daniels
A very dry read about the injustice paid to the hard-working Japanese-American citizens leading up to and after the Pearl Harbor incident. Called “relocation,” the wrongful incarceration of over 120,000 citizens based on ethnicity alone fits in well with the history we have with African-Americans and Native Americans. While it will not be very entertaining, as if it should be, the material is “must know” information on the history of our country and the precedence on which the future may seek counsel.
My Favorite Thing:
I was quite intrigued at the parallels revealed between what happened then and what could happen in the future in light of the watershed moment that occurred on September 11th, 2001 in New York City.
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
A world without books would be a true hell. Bradbury speculates with great imagination a world in which books are illegal and firemen are meant only to burn to the houses of those who own them. Intellect and wisdom have been forsaken in order to embrace mega-bytes and motherboards leaving professors and sages to exile themselves as homeless, train-track vagabonds reminiscing about the days when String theory and the enigma of time were worthy subjects.
My Favorite Thing:
The closing scene in which the hobos were actually banished thinkers who had apparently descended to the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. (Not that I like the idea, but the thought that that could be the result of such a society is alarming.)
Night
by Elie Wiesel
Wiesel, Nobel laureate, recounts his grueling discovery of the true meaning of life and purpose through his survival of the horridly rancid stain on our Earth that was and is the Holocaust. The details given were most likely nowhere close to the reality of the atrocity though what has been recorded is enough to turn your stomach and earnestly implore the mercy of our gracious God. This should be required reading for all humanity in order to educate the world in the hideousness of hate, exclusivism, racism and narcissism. So that these people will not have been murdered in total vanity, please read this account of the Jewish fate in World War II.
I shall not disgrace this book by providing you a sentence in which the word “favorite” is employed.
The World According to Mr. Rogers: Important Things to Remember
by Fred Rogers
This is a simple collection of quotes by the man we all envied for having a trolley and a traffic light in his living room. It’s nice, and a few things are actually quite thought provoking.
My Favorite Thing:
The author.
by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
Based on the infamous Scopes Trials in a 1925 Dayton, Tennessee courtroom, this play offers an only slightly varied version of the happenings that summer. Considering the current battle over the issue, and the apparently blinded Christian attitude toward it, this would be a fine read lasting you barely two days time.
My favorite thing:
Hornbeck’s wit. Compare it to that of the great writer/journalist/philosopher, H.L. Mencken, the man on whom the character is based.
Searching for God Knows What
by Donald Miller
Donald Miller should be considered the most prolific Christian writer of our present day. His grasp on logic and reality is reassuring in that those who would identify will no longer have to feel alone in the world. He approaches the Christian life truthfully in the relational manner in which it was intended to be lived instead of the rule-oriented, broken down, throwback to the Old Testament idea of formulas and bullet-points. A must read for everyone who has grown accustomed to breathing.
My favorite thing:
Most of the pages of text found between the front cover and the one in the back.
The Auto-Biography of an Ex-Coloured Man
by James Weldon Johnson
Follow the life of a nameless boy, a child born to a white man from a black mother, into manhood. His countenance is so fair that he could pass as a caucasian, but doesn’t quite understand the power of such a thought until he lives a most extraordinary life worthy of any world class man of affluence, yet still finds that he will be limited by something as merely biological as pigment.
My Favorite Thing:
Notice the underlying theme music plays in his growth and how it affects, with great consequence, the outcomes of his life.
Prisoners Without Trial
by Roger Daniels
A very dry read about the injustice paid to the hard-working Japanese-American citizens leading up to and after the Pearl Harbor incident. Called “relocation,” the wrongful incarceration of over 120,000 citizens based on ethnicity alone fits in well with the history we have with African-Americans and Native Americans. While it will not be very entertaining, as if it should be, the material is “must know” information on the history of our country and the precedence on which the future may seek counsel.
My Favorite Thing:
I was quite intrigued at the parallels revealed between what happened then and what could happen in the future in light of the watershed moment that occurred on September 11th, 2001 in New York City.
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
A world without books would be a true hell. Bradbury speculates with great imagination a world in which books are illegal and firemen are meant only to burn to the houses of those who own them. Intellect and wisdom have been forsaken in order to embrace mega-bytes and motherboards leaving professors and sages to exile themselves as homeless, train-track vagabonds reminiscing about the days when String theory and the enigma of time were worthy subjects.
My Favorite Thing:
The closing scene in which the hobos were actually banished thinkers who had apparently descended to the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. (Not that I like the idea, but the thought that that could be the result of such a society is alarming.)
Night
by Elie Wiesel
Wiesel, Nobel laureate, recounts his grueling discovery of the true meaning of life and purpose through his survival of the horridly rancid stain on our Earth that was and is the Holocaust. The details given were most likely nowhere close to the reality of the atrocity though what has been recorded is enough to turn your stomach and earnestly implore the mercy of our gracious God. This should be required reading for all humanity in order to educate the world in the hideousness of hate, exclusivism, racism and narcissism. So that these people will not have been murdered in total vanity, please read this account of the Jewish fate in World War II.
I shall not disgrace this book by providing you a sentence in which the word “favorite” is employed.
The World According to Mr. Rogers: Important Things to Remember
by Fred Rogers
This is a simple collection of quotes by the man we all envied for having a trolley and a traffic light in his living room. It’s nice, and a few things are actually quite thought provoking.
My Favorite Thing:
The author.
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